


Up, Up and Away

by Daegaer



Series: Scientific Endeavour [4]
Category: Weiss Kreuz
Genre: Assassins, M/M, Mile High Club, Steampunk, Zeppelins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-25
Updated: 2011-02-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 18:23:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/179861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daegaer/pseuds/Daegaer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fleeing England, Nagi and Mamoru seize a little time to themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Up, Up and Away

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [](http://puddingcat.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://puddingcat.livejournal.com/)**puddingcat** for beta-reading!

It was, Nagi considered, examining the complex gears with professional interest, not altogether a bad thing to be confined upon an airship for the long journey to the United States of America, a place his team had never before considered visiting and in which most of them had not the slightest interest. He looked about him surreptitiously and then ducked down, sliding his slim body into a low-lying crevice within the immense machinery and gazing up at its workings in something approaching rapture. Not, he thought further, that he could ever give Crawford the satisfaction of showing pleasure in the voyage, since he had been dragged from his experiments by the sudden conviction of the self-styled master criminal that all was known and they should flee the country. In vain had his friends suggested that his fears were not premonition but indigestion, and reluctantly had accompanied him when Crawford had revealed he had already spent a great part of their ill-gotten gains on first class tickets to New York aboard the most luxurious of the German airships. As he had already lost the remainder of their money on the races at Newmarket there was little left for them in London, although Nagi had raged against God, man and Crawford when it had become clear that no provision had been made for the transport of his toweringly massive difference engine. No matter, he thought, he would build another – he had thought for some time that the system by which he operated the old one was slow and overloaded when he attempted to run differing collections of punched cards simultaneously. His new difference engine – the seventh of its kind - would be faster and capable of handling as many collections of punched card as he could devise. There was only one thing, he thought, as he removed a small screwdriver from his pocket and began to remove some plates so that he could see the inner workings of the engine more clearly, that could in any way cheer him more at this precise moment –

A hand stroked the ankle and foot he had left protruding from under the engines.

"Hello, Mamoru," Nagi said in the tongue of that far-off land that had seen both his birth and that of the youthful ambassador to Great Britain.

"Hello," Mamoru said, hunkering down and peering in. "I've been looking for you all over! What are you doing?"

"Tinkering," Nagi said, and paused. "Or sabotage. I hadn't really decided yet."

"Should you really sabotage an airship upon which we are passengers?" Mamoru said.

"It behoves," Nagi said with some severity, "those of genius not to concern themselves with such mundane issues."

"I suppose you're right," Mamoru said, the conciliatory tone of his voice indicating to any who heard it that he had a favour he wished granted. Being, as he had already stated, a youth of high intellect and his interlocutor being as he was, _Mamoru_ , Nagi had little doubt as to the nature of that favour, such infinitesimal doubt a remained being firmly dispelled when Mamoru crawled in with him and lay atop him, murmuring, "How snug a fit it is in here!"

"I believe that if we wriggle a little further in we might find a slightly larger space," Nagi said.

"I'm not sure I can wait that long," Mamoru said and kissed him fiercely.

"Me neither," Nagi said indistinctly against his lips and embraced him with both his natural strength and the unnatural additional might given him by his experiments against nature.

"Ouch," Mamoru said as he hit against the brass plate above them as Nagi's passion unwisely raised them from the floor. "Oh, Nagi, now I'm covered in oil."

"Sorry," said Nagi insincerely.

"Don't be, I'm sure the slipperiness will come in useful," Mamoru said, kissing him again.

It was as Nagi was engaged in removing as much of Mamoru's clothing as he could in the tight confines of the narrow passage in which they lay that a most unwelcome intrusion came to break in upon their idyll.

"Hey! You there, what are you doing?"

"A crewman," sighed Nagi, rocked by the unfairness of the world's opinion that the innards of machinery were not fit locations for acts of coitus.

"Ignore him, I'll have my bodyguards kill him," Mamoru said, sliding an oily and distracting hand into Nagi's trousers.

"Crawford was most insistent that we draw no untoward attention to ourselves," Nagi said in disappointment.

"Really, what good is it to discover that one is of the samurai class if one can't even have persons of lower status summarily beheaded?" Mamoru muttered.

"Let's bribe him to look the other way," Nagi said, wriggling a hand into Mamoru's pocket and ignoring the petulant sigh when it became obvious he was merely looking for spare change. His quest was interrupted as he and Mamoru were roughly dragged from their hiding spot by the crewman.

"Oh, your faces!" laughed Schuldig, for it was he who had come upon them. "It is quite delicious to see such consternation upon your face for once, Nagi."

"I am not disconcerted, I am merely plotting my swift and inevitable revenge," Nagi snapped. "Go away." It was most embarrassing, he thought, to have allowed the young German come upon them in such a moment of weakness. It was a good thing he had time to pack a supply of sulphuric acid in his luggage, and that he could wipe away the shame in suppuration and agony.

"I'm going nowhere. I merely regret I cannot make a daguerreotype of your little sulky expression to examine at my leisure," Schuldig said, adding, "Urrrrgh," and collapsing to the iron floor plates as Mamoru hit him soundly across the back of the head with Nagi's second best wrench.

"Mamoru!" Nagi exclaimed in surprise, "I didn't think you had it in you!" He looked at the way Mamoru was caressing the wrench, adding, "Where did you get that? I've been looking for it for ages."

"Oh, I . . . just needed it for a while," Mamoru said in a vaguely salacious tone that brooked no further inquiry. "What should we do with him?"

"I'd say we should put him down with the fuel for the engines," Nagi said, "but I suppose Crawford would miss him and complain so much we should have to kill him too, and whilst one murder can be explained as mere youthful high spirits, two might excite the attention of the authorities. We'd probably have to kill Farfarello too, just so he didn't feel left out."

"That does seem a little too much exercise before dinner," Mamoru agreed. He brightened, smiling brilliantly at Nagi. "I believe the captain said earlier we were approaching a lightning storm – do you perhaps think . . ."

"Mamoru!" Nagi cried, kissing him and holding him close. "You are almost as clever as I! I believe we have within our grasp a unique moment in the history of science!"

"Yes, science!" Mamoru exclaimed, the actions of his hands indicating he mistakenly assumed the word had a different meaning in English to that Nagi had intended.

The two young men looked down upon Schuldig's supine form with malicious and not entirely sane intent.

  


* * *

  
It was entirely a good thing, Nagi thought a little later, to have found a person of such sense as Mamoru, who not only financed some of Nagi's more outrageous experiments lavishly with the generosity of one who has an extravagant entertainment budget against which to claim expenses but who was also genuinely interested in the furtherment of scientific knowledge. That he was also genuinely and personally interested in Nagi's person was, Nagi considered in less and less coherent thoughts, a bonus, a fillip, a most diverting . . . a most diverting . . . diversion, he concluded.

"Oh, _Mamoru_ ," he cried, overcome as the mighty storm without buffeted the airship's gondola, the immense waves of energy adding to the youths' crashing passion within the small engineering closet in which they had hidden. Mamoru's cries joined his, loud and eager, and almost, thought Nagi, drowning out the sound of Schuldig's screams. It was most illogical, he thought, for Schuldig to complain so vociferously – whilst it might be a little alarming to see the lightning storm at such close quarters, no doubt the effects of having so much electricity channelled through his form a second time would enhance the young German's mental powers of telepathy, or at least give him the ability to act as a human charger for Nagi's battery operated cannon. Ignoring the faint cries, he returned to his task of spreading engine oil evenly over Mamoru's person.

Outside, soaked in a strong saline solution to enhance conductivity and strapped to an exposed strut, Schuldig watched the lightning coming ever closer.


End file.
